Lion Rock Speaker Series: Lisa Norris, Joe Powell, and Jeff Suwak

Tuesday, Jan 29, 2019 6:00 pm

January 29, 2018 at 6:00 p.m.

Lisa Norris

Lisa Norris is a professor of English at Central Washington University where she has taught since 2007. Previously, she was an instructor for 15 years at Virginia Tech. Her story collections are Toy Guns and Women Who Sleep With Animals, winners of the Willa Cather and SFASU Fiction Prizes, respectively. Her poems and nonfiction have appeared in Shenandoah, Ascent, Fourth Genre, Terrain.Org., Bullets Into Bells, Gulf Stream, and others. Her website is www.lisanorriswriter.com.

Joe Powell

Joseph Powell has published six full-length collections of poetry, including Holding Nothing Back (Main Street Rag, 2018), Preamble to the Afterlife (2013), and Hard Earth (March Street, 2010) and four chapbooks. Two books (Getting Here and Counting the Change) won the Quarterly Review of Literature's international book award. He co-wrote a textbook on meter with Mark Halperin called Accent on Meter, (NCTE, 2004). His book of short stories, Fish Grooming & Other Stories, (2007) was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award, and he won a National Endowment for the Arts Award in 2009. He is a CWU Univeristy Distinguished Professor and Emeritus Faculty of English at Central Washington University.

Jeff Suwak

Jeff Suwak attended CWU after finishing his service in the Army. While deployed overseas, he swore that if he got through it alive, he'd pursue his passion for writing and literature. CWU was the beginning of that journey. Today an editor and writer in Tacoma, he's excited to revisit CWU, and particularly to talk with any veteran students who may want some perspective from someone who's made the readjustment to civilian life. He has been published in five different countries (he likes to say that because he thinks it sounds cool). In addition to an upcoming appearance in Stupefying Stories (run by cyberpunk legend Bruce Bethke), Jeff's recent publications include "Shang Qin's War" in Guardbridge Books' international anthology titled Myriad Lands: Around the World, "The Guitaissta's Lament" in Dimension6 (run by Australia's most-eminent Keith Stevenson), and The Familiar and his Alchemist (audio version produced on Audible by Plympton and print in Spark: A Creative Anthology). Recently he's been experimenting with the Medium.com platform and is a "top writer" there. His novella Beyond the Tempest Gate was published by Vabella Publishing in 2013. He also writes about music, his locale, and “various doodads.” During his time as a student, he won a creative writing scholarship at Pacific Lutheran University and the Nursia Prize for Undergraduate Scholarship for his paper on Cormac McCarthy's Suttree. It's possible, though he can't confirm, that he is the only writer to ever have published work in four different institutions of higher learning while he was enrolled as a student in them. His website is www.beyondthetempestgate.com